Decomposing seaweed replaces paying tourists on beaches
CANCUN, MEXICO— Surrounded by a four-man camera crew, the Japanese honeymooners were ready to make memories.
In their wedding whites against the turquoise Caribbean waters, the couple leapt off the beach and kicked their heels. Then they whipped out matching sombreros and unfurled a giant Mexican flag. Their photo shoot was perfect, if you could ignore the smelly strip of brown algae fouling the white sands.
“It’s disgusting,” photographer Juan Manuel Delgado said. “I’ve worked on the beaches for 21 years, and this is something that has never happened before.”
From Barbados to Belize, Cancun to Tulum, a viny brown seaweed known as sargassum has invaded the Caribbean basin this year. Vast floating mats have washed up and buried beaches. The piles of seaweed grew more than a metre high in Antigua and forced some people to abandon their homes. Tobago’s legislature declared a natural disaster last month as the stench of decomposing seaweed, and the dead fish and turtles caught within it, caused nausea among tourists.
For Mexico, whose Caribbean coastline attracts more than 10 million visitors and generates over $10 billion in revenue from tourism each year, the arrival of sargassum became a cabinet-level crisis. When Jose Eduardo Mariscal de la Selva, the director general of Cancun’s maritime department, received a photo one morning in July from his beach cleaners, he assumed it was a joke.
Within days, the country’s tourism and environ- ment ministers were touring Cancun to assess the calamity.
Since the July invasion, Mexico has launched a herculean cleanup effort. Along the coast of Quintana Roo state, the government hired 5,000 day labourers to rake seaweed from more than 160 kilometres of beaches.
From one popular stretch of Cancun, workers hauled off14,000 cubic metres of seaweed in more than 1,000 truckloads, Mariscal said.
Authorities say that the collected sargassum can be used to fortify sand dunes and be reprocessed into fertilizers for public parks and gardens. But those silver linings don’t mean much to the average Mexican hotel owner.
"Tourists are not going to want to set one foot in this town because of the pestilence here,” said Cristobal Aguilar, who runs the Hotel Arenas in Mahahual, farther south along the coast.
His hotel is offering 25-per-cent discounts to attract customers willing to ignore the vegetative stench.
“Things are very bad here,” he said.